Developing in Delphi, using the latest Skype4Com beta with 2.6 Preview, Delphi takes a very long time to cope with switching to or activating the Skype4Com component. I switched back to 2.5 and the long wait went away. I've tried working with PHP5 and Skype4Com and had no problems. I've no idea what's going on here but there seems to be some incompatibility or initialisation problem between 2.6 and the latest Skype4Com.

Would DebugView (http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/DebugView.html) help trace the cause of the delay?